Loka wants to be the antidote to dystopia fatigue
Founder Bobby Mukherjee on the pursuit of actionable, hopeful near
futures
Reposted from the Loka's medium page
medium.com/Loka
Hi readers. I just finished this
article in the New Yorker
on the famous science fiction author William Gibson. The article
talks about how some of Gibson’s best sci-fi ideas actually come
from present time, as opposed to looking years into the future.
Instead of thinking about “beam me up, Scotty” and flying cars and
other unrealized futures, he looks at the pragmatic. This is very
much what you’ll find here.
There are a lot of forecasts for the future that (validly) bring
us down. We too are futurists, but not the dystopian kind. Not
Terminator, not Blade Runner, not Mad Max. I’m a big fan of those
movies, by the way, but professionally, it’s not what Loka is
about. If I had to summarize Loka’s vision in a single tagline, it
would be:
the pursuit of actionable, optimistic innovation. And that’s the spirit we aim to bring to our storytelling arm.
We’re not undermining the very serious issues that humans and our
planet face, we just focus in practice on ways to fix tomorrow,
today. We’re hopeful in practice, not just sentiment.
Our stories might take the format of a reported piece, an
interview, an essay, a breakthrough, or a mix of a few.
Our optimistic innovation is
rooted in things that are possible
A good example of this is the way in which the COVID-19 vaccine
that Moderna and now Pfizer have come up with. This groundbreaking
vaccine was
created in just two days. How? Not by vaccination moonshots, but by piggybacking on
something they’ve had in development for years called mRNA, or
messenger RNA. mRNA is genetic material that tells cells how to
make proteins. Moderna deployed a recipe of the vaccine in the
mRNA in about 48 hours. And it'll probably change everyone's life
this year and for years to come.
That’s a model example of what we at Loka like to talk about, and
that’s what you’ll find here: things that are actionable.
Innovation that’s possible now. Ways in which smart, ethical
people are building on existing foundations to create something
new, groundbreaking, and, hopefully, life changing.
You'll find thoughts from ML
experts, data scientists, founders
& visionaries
You may be asking yourself, what makes us qualified to talk about
these things? Well, we've spent years working on complex
data engineering, data science, and machine learning problems for clients across
healthcare, life sciences, the grocery industry, the social media
industry, and software in general. To name a few.
Members of our team are responsible for helping Fortune 500s and
series-A funded startups, such as
Sentropy, whose tech is rooting out hate speech on Twitter, and
Cloudsort, who is changing shipping as we know it. We also work with the
Blue Cross Blue Shield Institute
as they bring free
Lyft
rides to members so they can get to appointments, as well as
Afresh as they
use machine learning to reduce fresh food waste for grocery
stories by the billions. Loka works behind the scenes on these
important missions. We help build the apps, deploy the tech,
ideate the platforms.
We get hired to deliver bleeding-edge tech to solve problems
today, not create demos for things that won’t work. It’s what we
do for a living and that's why we like to read about it. And now,
write about it.
Who is going to get the most from
these reads?
We want our stories to be accessible to anyone interested in
learning about ways in which smart, good people are making the
world better. We’re in the business of seeding optimistic but
realistic hope that big changes are possible
Loka’s Medium will also be a home for the people who are building
and dreaming up these changes. You might be a curious founder, VP
of cloud services, machine learning engineer, healthcare
technician, or a climate technologist. And we want to hear from
you, too. Are you working on a system mitigating the dangers faced
by medical workers? Are you using data or AI to address the
climate crisis? Are you launching the next Space X? Reach out! We don’t just
want our content to inspire real people working on real solutions,
we want it to be informed by them.
Bobby Mukherjee is the founder and CEO of Loka, a Silicon Valley-based software consultancy that helps
companies--from funded startups to Fortune 500 brands--ship their
innovations faster. Prior to Loka, Bobby started and successfully
sold two startups, including one that was acquired by NBC.
Put simply, we encourage free syndication. If you’re interested in
sharing, posting or Tweeting our full articles, or even just a
snippet, just reach out to medium@loka.com. We also ask that you
attribute Loka, Inc. as the original source. And if you post on the
web, please link back to the original content on Loka.com. Pretty
straight forward stuff. And a good deal, right? Free content for a
link back.
If you want to collaborate on something or have another idea for
content,
just email me.
We’d love to join forces! 🙌